Oppenheimer, Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan’s recent biopic, Oppenheimer, has been hailed by some as “the most epic WWII film yet.”
Starring Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, and Emily Blunt
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Running time: 180 minutes
Rated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior
The U.S. military dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one of the most significant and controversial acts in American history. How did Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” judge that action and his pivotal role in enabling it? This question runs throughout Christopher Nolan’s recent biopic, Oppenheimer, hailed by some as “the most epic WWII film yet.”1
The film is based on a detailed, extensively researched biography called American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the film, that moniker is given to Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) by Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), but I’ve found no evidence of anyone using it in reference to Oppenheimer during his lifetime. The inspiration for the title seems to have come from a 1945 article in Scientific Monthly, which described the development of the weapon: “Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.”2
Oppenheimer depicts the story of the physicist’s rise from a mentally troubled graduate student at Cambridge, to a talented teacher forming the new theoretical physics program at the University of California-Berkeley, to director of the Manhattan Project. Later, he became director of the Institute for Advanced Studies and a representative of fellow scientists in the newspapers and to those in Washington, thereby influencing U.S. nuclear policy—before his eventual fall from grace. The film does not show his incredible story in a linear fashion; rather, it interweaves scenes from the 1930s and 1940s with two parallel “trials”: the National Security Board’s interrogation of Oppenheimer in 1954 about his political activity in the 1930s and the 1959 Senate confirmation hearing for his one-time colleague, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). The questions and answers of both trials form a kind of narration that connects the dots and moves the story along.
The various timelines might be confusing if not for the film’s creative use of color. Strauss’s hearing and memories are shown entirely in black and white, keeping them separate from Oppenheimer’s perspective. Oppenheimer’s interrogation and memories are in color, but a rather muted and dark color palette, even during scenes in the New Mexico desert where he sets up and runs the central division of the Manhattan Project. This darker palette sets an appropriate tone for the memories of the troubled, sometimes depressed physicist. Only scenes regarding the atomic bomb have bright colors: the yellows, oranges, and reds of the shocking fireball and a bright white light when Oppenheimer is imagining the effects of the bomb.
The film portrays several facets of Oppenheimer’s personality in a way that is both engaging and substantially accurate (albeit with a few artistic liberties).
He is depicted as brilliant but with weaknesses and as intellectually honest. We see his struggles in the laboratory at Cambridge (he never excelled in the experimental side of physics) and, on his arrival at UC-Berkeley, his acknowledgment that he’s not much use in building equipment, though he appreciates the necessity of doing so. Later, when a graduate student questions Oppenheimer’s calculations, he tells the student to check them because “your math is better than mine” (mathematics was one of the real-life Oppenheimer’s weaknesses compared to his fellow physicists). He inspired hero worship in many, which was key to his success as a teacher and director; one colleague wrote that it “is worth living a lifetime just to know that mankind has been able to produce such a being.”3 He was also witty, which is captured a few times in the film; for example, when his military counterpart on the Manhattan Project disagrees with a plan, growling, “I don’t like it,” Oppenheimer quips, “You don’t like anything enough for that to be a fair test.”
The interrogation of Oppenheimer in 1954 largely revolved around his political activities while a teacher at UC-Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology in the 1930s—before he was hired to manage the building of the atomic bomb. A central claim of the interrogators was that he had been a member of the Communist Party during that time, a claim that the FBI was never able to prove (despite extensive surveillance) and Oppenheimer himself denied, though he did not hide his support of left-wing causes at the time, such as organizing various coercive unions.4 He was also surrounded by, and in some cases had romantic relationships with, various former or then-current Communist Party members, including his wife, Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt), who left the Party four years before their marriage.5
However, Oppenheimer saw himself as an “independent intellectual” who happened to sympathize with many causes that the left championed in the 1930s. As one friend put it, Oppenheimer would “agree with [Communist Party] aims and objectives at any particular time if he had decided in his own mind that they had merit. He would not, however, condone those objectives with which he did not agree.”6 He began to actively distance himself from communism in 1939, when two physicists who had spent time in the Soviet Union told him of their experiences there, and he later called communist ideas “complete nonsense”—facts omitted from the film.7
One possible reason he never joined the Party (and, indeed, warned his brother against doing so) was his desire to remain independent. His close friend Haakon Chevalier wrote, “There was no blindness in him, no narrow partisanship, no automatic hewing to a line.”8 This independence is captured in the film when a Party member, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), comments that although Oppenheimer has read all three volumes of Das Kapital (in the original German), he doesn’t “seem very committed” to Marx’s ideas. Oppenheimer replies that he is “committed to freely thinking about how to improve our world.”
More relevant to the later investigation into him, Oppenheimer was also unquestionably patriotic, determined to help the United States “defend Western values against the Nazis.”9 He told one colleague, “I’m cutting off every communist connection, for if I don’t, the government will find it difficult to use me. I don’t want to let anything interfere with my usefulness to the nation.”10 The film captures his patriotism with his most condensed statement on the United States: “Damn it, I happen to love this country.”
The momentous events depicted in the film and the fractured mental state of the title character are mostly easy to understand, even for those unfamiliar with his story. However, a few obscure yet important references are used in the film with insufficient explanation. One is the name of the bomb’s test site: Trinity. When asked to name it, Oppenheimer mutters something about a “three-person’d god,” which is lost on the person he’s speaking to and likely on viewers. In fact, it’s a partial quotation of the first line of the English poet John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV,” which the real-life Oppenheimer later claimed came into his mind at the time.11 This is a nod to his interest in literature and poetry and an indication that he was a polymath (he’s been compared to Leonardo da Vinci).12 Ethically, however, the subject of the poem tells us more: The speaker feels separated from God and tied instead to Satan—he says he loves God, “But am betroth’d unto your enemy”—and begs God to break his ties to Satan and bring him back to righteousness.13
This should not be viewed as a sign of religiosity on Oppenheimer’s part, for he was never religious. Rather, he appears to have viewed God as a metaphor for good, and Satan as a metaphor for evil in his internal conflict about building a bomb that he believed necessary to defeat the Nazis—as he put it, “only an atomic bomb could dislodge Hitler from Europe”—but that would cause massive destruction, suffering, and death.14
Another reference that might be lost on many viewers is the line he utters when the atomic test succeeds: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” This line is from the Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text that Oppenheimer read in the original Sanskrit.15 The story is about Krishna, a Hindu god, appearing to a prince, Arjuna, and convincing him to overcome his qualms about attacking the rival army because it contained family members and friends.16 Arjuna asks Krishna to show himself in his divine form, as a confirmation that this is an authority he should believe; when Krishna does so, he appears as a monstrous being with many faces and arms, and declares, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer later reported that he had this image in mind when watching the explosion.17
His biographers suggest that, given his knowledge of and interest in Hinduism, he may have named the Trinity site for the three key gods in the religion: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the maintainer or preserver (of which Krishna is an incarnation); and Shiva, the destroyer. If so, this may be because Oppenheimer saw a parallel in the bomb: Though it was clearly an object of destruction, it was, he thought, the only way to bring peace to the world. Indeed, he and other scientists working on the bomb repeatedly spoke of it as creating “a new world.”18
When, in 1954, Oppenheimer was interrogated about his loyalties and previous left-wing activities, he cooperated with the investigation, though it tormented him. This “martyrdom,” which cost him his reputation and privacy, loosely parallels the torture of Prometheus for disobeying Zeus and bringing fire to man. Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, suggests in the film that he accepts it so readily to atone—whether in his own mind or the minds of others—for his role in the dropping of the bombs. Whether that is the case, and whether his actions required atonement, is left for the audience to ponder.
Oppenheimer was a key mind behind the invention and development of the bombs that ended World War II. He was also haunted by the question of whether producing these bombs was the right thing to do. The film opens with the words: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. For this he was tortured for eternity.” The parallel is powerful. Oppenheimer portrays, through superb filmmaking and performances by all the actors involved, the story of this modern American Prometheus.